Changing Digital Age in the Wake of COVID-19

Virtual teams play a crucial role in today’s knowledge-based organisation for overcoming challenges in our dynamic world, especially in the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teams play a key role in today’s knowledge-based organization for overcoming challenges in our dynamic world. Drawing on social information processing theory, this study explores the effect of members’ humility and team environment within a leaderless team mainly based on virtual platforms. Their impacts on shared leadership, relationship conflict and team and individual performance were investigated. Surveying 219 students forming 61 virtual leaderless teams, our findings showed that a high level of humility and a positive team environment can help to improve shared leadership within a team, which contributes to team performance. Moreover, both humility and team environment have a negative relationship with relationship conflict, which depressed both team and individual performance. Our analysis also indicated that humility positively interacts with team environment on shared leadership.

Continuous learning and employee performance: a moderated examination of managers' coaching behavior in India

PurposeBy integrating organizational support theory (OST) and social cognitive theory, this study investigates types of managers' coaching behavior as experienced by the employees. Furthermore, the study examines whether employees would exhibit greater task and contextual performance when organizational learning is blended with a specific coaching behavior of their manager.Design/methodology/approachUsing primary data from 298 software engineers working in select information technology companies across India, the current study attempts to assess moderating effect of managers' coaching behavior in two relationships, including continuous learning and employees' task performance (CL-TP) and continuous learning and employees' contextual performance (CL-CP).FindingsResult of exploratory factor analysis suggests that managers of select organizations exhibit two major types of coaching behavior: inspiration-based coaching behavior and facilitation-based coaching behavior. On the moderating role of coaching behavior, it is documented that facilitation-based coaching behavior significantly positively moderates both stated (CL-TP and CL-CP) relationships, whereas inspiration-based coaching behavior of supervisors has positive significant effect on CL-TP relationship but negatively moderates the CL-CP relationship.Research limitations/implicationsThe extent to which the findings of this study can be generalized is constrained by the limited sample and organizational context.Practical implicationsThe most important managerial implication for all learning organizations is that both kinds of coaching behaviors help improving the task performance of the employees, but managers should prefer facilitation-based coaching style in order to generate higher contextual performance of employees.Originality/valueThis study contributes to practitioners and existing literature by explaining how individual performance of employees is affected by the investment made by organizations in facilitating continuous learning.

Resting-State Functional Connectivity in the Dorsal Attention Network Relates to Behavioral Performance in Spatial Attention Tasks and May Show Task-Related Adaptation

Between-subject variability in cognitive performance has been related to inter-individual differences in functional brain networks. Targeting the dorsal attention network (DAN) we questioned (i) whether resting-state functional connectivity (FC) within the DAN can predict individual performance in spatial attention tasks and (ii) whether there is short-term adaptation of DAN-FC in response to task engagement. Twenty-seven participants first underwent resting-state fMRI (PRE run), they subsequently performed different tasks of spatial attention [including visual search (VS)] and immediately afterwards received another rs-fMRI (POST run). Intra- and inter-hemispheric FC between core hubs of the DAN, bilateral intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and frontal eye field (FEF), was analyzed and compared between PRE and POST. Furthermore, we investigated rs-fMRI-behavior correlations between the DAN-FC in PRE/POST and task performance parameters. The absolute DAN-FC did not change from PRE to POST. However, different significant rs-fMRI-behavior correlations were revealed for intra-/inter-hemispheric connections in the PRE and POST run. The stronger the FC between left FEF and IPS before task engagement, the better was the learning effect (improvement of reaction times) in VS (r = 0.521, p = 0.024). And the faster the VS (mean RT), the stronger was the FC between right FEF and IPS after task engagement (r = −0.502, p = 0.032). To conclude, DAN-FC relates to the individual performance in spatial attention tasks supporting the view of functional brain networks as priors for cognitive ability. Despite a high inter- and intra-individual stability of DAN-FC, the change of FC-behavior correlations after task performance possibly indicates task-related adaptation of the DAN, underlining that behavioral experiences may shape intrinsic brain activity. However, spontaneous state fluctuations of the DAN-FC over time cannot be fully ruled out as an alternative explanation.

FE-learning and the virtual transformation of histopathology teaching during COVID-19: its impact on student learning experience and outcome

Background Medical and pathology education has gone through an immense transformation from traditional face-to-face teaching mode to virtual mode during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study evaluated the effectiveness of online histopathology teaching in medical education during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in Griffith University, Australia. Methods Second-year medical students (n = 150) who had previously completed one year of face-to-face histopathology teaching, completed an online questionnaire rating their learning experiences before and during the COVID-19 pandemic after the completion of their histology and pathology practical sessions. The students' histopathology assessment results were then compared to the histopathology results of a prior second-year cohort to determine if the switch to online histopathology teaching had an impact on students' learning outcome. Results A thematic analysis of the qualitative comments strongly indicated that online histopathology teaching was instrumental, more comfortable to engage in and better structured compared to face-to-face teaching. Compared to the previous year's practical assessment, individual performance was not significantly different (p = 0.30) and compared to the prior cohort completing the same curriculum the mean overall mark was significantly improved from 65.36% ± 13.12% to 75.83% ± 14.84% (p < 0.05) during the COVID-19 impacted online teaching period. Conclusions The transformation of teaching methods during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic improved student engagement without any adverse effects on student learning outcomes in histology and pathology education.

Rural Innovation Using Technology in Progressive Agriculture

Sustainable technology is an individual and group effort through the experts and professionals in rural as well as urban people. Rural innovation involves efficient execution of ideas, information, imagination, and innovative initiative in fulfilling social requirements, and new ideas are converted into something useful for the rural development. It starts with the proper utilization of resources, rural innovation, and modernization of agricultural activities. The study attempts to identify the use of sustainable technology with rural innovation, progressive agriculture, and women empowerment for rural development. The required data collected led to a discussion that the practices of modern farming with the active involvements of rural population and promoting individual performance and fine-tuning of green initiative among rural livelihoods. The results of this study include the difficulties in progressive effort on rural innovation vis-a-vis planning and executing of advanced farming, protecting traditional arts, and crafting through maximum involvement of rural women.

The Effect of Hairdresser's Job Crafting on Customer Orientation and Work Performance

In this study, a total of 311 questionnaires were used through SPSS 21.0 to analyze the effect of hairdressers' job crafting on customer orientation and work performance. The results of the survey are as follows. First, hairdressers' job crafting appeared in three dimensions: cognitive crafting, work crafting, and relationship crafting, and customer orientation came in three dimensions: problem-solving orientation, response orientation, and appearance orientation. In addition, work performance came in two dimensions: individual performance and organizational performance. Second, it was found that job crafting had a significant effect on customer orientation and work performance. Therefore, it was found that the reorganization of the hairdresser's appropriate work (appropriate distribution of work, identifying the importance of work, etc.) affects customer propensity and work performance. This study is expected to be used as basic data for hairdressers' job crafting activities, and research on job crafting related to segmentation by age group and positive psychology of hairdressers is expected to be conducted in the future.

Self-Selection of Peers and Performance

This paper studies how the presence of peers and different peer assignment rules—self-selection versus random assignment—affect individual performance. Using a framed field experiment, we find that the presence of a randomly assigned peer improves performance by 28% of a standard deviation (SD), whereas self-selecting peers induces an additional 15%–18% SD improvement in performance. Our results document peer effects in multiple characteristics and show that self-selection changes these characteristics. However, a decomposition reveals that variations in the peer composition contribute only little to the performance differences across peer assignment rules. Rather, we find that self-selection has a direct effect on performance. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis.

THE EFFECT OF ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP ON ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE: LITERATURE REVIEW

In a competitive, dynamic, complex and uncertain business environment as it is today, a leadership type is needed that can play an important role for the survival, success, and growth of the organization. This paper aims to review the influence of entrepreneurial leadership on organizational performance in terms of three hierarchies: individuals, groups/teams, and the organization as a whole. According to the findings of the review, entrepreneurial leadership has a major impact on the individual performance of employees and teams, especially in terms of creativity and creative behavior. Moreover, Entrepreneurial leadership has a significant effect on overall organizational performance both in financial and non-financial dimensions.